Non-contacting face seals are usually applied to high-speed, high-pressure rotating equipment, where the use of ordinary mechanical face seals with face contact would result in excessive generation of heat and wear. Non-contacting operation avoids this undesirable face contact when the shaft is rotating above a certain minimum speed, which is often called a lift-off speed.
As with ordinary mechanical seals, a non-contacting face seal consists of two sealing rings, each of which is provided with a very precisely finished sealing surface. These surfaces are perpendicular to and concentric with the axis of rotation. Both rings are positioned adjacent to each other with the sealing surfaces in contact at conditions of zero pressure differential and zero speed of rotation. One of the rings is normally fixed to the rotatable shaft, the other located within the seal housing structure and allowed to move axially. To enable axial movement of the sealing ring and yet prevent leakage of the sealed fluid, a sealing element is placed between the ring and the housing. This sealing element must permit some sliding motion while under pressure, therefore normally a top quality O-ring is selected for that duty. This O-ring is often called the secondary seal.
To achieve non-contacting operation of the seal, one of the two sealing surfaces in contact is usually provided with shallow surface recesses, which act to generate pressure fields that force two sealing surfaces apart. When the magnitude of the forces resulting from these pressure fields is large enough to overcome the forces that urge seal faces closed, the sealing surfaces will separate and form a clearance, resulting in non-contacting operation. The character of the separation forces is such that their magnitude decreases with the increase of face separation. Opposing or closing forces, on the other hand, depend on sealed pressure level and as such are independent of face separation. They result from the sealed pressure and the spring force acting on the back surface of the axially movable sealing ring. Since the separation or opening force depends on the separation distance between sealing surfaces, during the operation of the seal or on imposition of sufficient pressure differential equilibrium separation between both surfaces will establish itself. This occurs when closing and opening forces are in equilibrium and equal to each other. Equilibrium separation constantly changes within the range of gaps. The goal is to have the low limit of this range above zero. Another goal is to make this range as narrow as possible, because on its high end the separation between the faces will lead to increased seal leakage. Since non-contacting seals operate by definition with a clearance between sealing surfaces, their leakage will be higher then that of a contacting seal of similar geometry. Yet, the absence of contact will mean zero wear on the sealing surfaces and therefore a relatively low amount of heat generated between them. It is this low generated heat and lack of wear that enables the application of non-contacting seals to high-speed turbomachinery, where the sealed fluid is gas. Turbocompressors are used to compress this fluid and since gas has a relatively low mass, they normally operate at very high speeds and with a number of compression stages in series.
During a typical period of operation, a turbocompressor is started and the power unit starts the shaft rotating. At the initial warm-up stage of operation, shaft speeds may be quite low. Typically, oil is used to support the shaft at its two radial bearings and one thrust bearing. Oil warms up in oil pumps and also accepts shear heat from compressor bearings. The oil together with process fluid turbulence and compression in turn warm-up the compressor. Once the full operating speed is reached, the compressor reaches in time some elevated equilibrium temperature. On shutdown, shaft rotation stops and the compressor begins to cool down. In this situation, various components of the compressor cool down at different rates and, importantly, the shaft contracts with decreasing temperature at a different rate than the compressor casing. The net result of this at the seal is the axial creeping motion of the shaft and the seal parts fixed to it, which may move the rotatable sealing face away from the stationary sealing face. With often only a spring load behind the stationary sealing ring, the stationary sealing face may not be able to follow the retracting rotating face, if the above mentioned secondary seal has too much friction. These prior art secondary seal arrangements can be found for example in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,768,790; 5,058,905 or 5,071,141. The term used often in the industry for this phenomenon is "seal face hang-up". In such case there may be a very high leakage of process fluid the next time the compressor is restarted and often in such cases the seal will resist all attempts to reseal it. The seal must then be removed and replaced at a considerable cost in time and lost production.